Miss January 1966

Judy Tyler

Details

About Judy Tyler

Granada Hills, a 25-minute freeway jaunt from downtown Los Angeles, is just one of a hundred hamlets that honeycomb the circumference of the City of Angels, but the presence there of 18-year-old, Titian-tressed charmer Judy Tyler has made it a very special suburb as far as we’re concerned. The only constant in the exploding L.A. megalopolis being change, Judy, who bubbles with youthful vitality, deems it a rare distinction to be a native-born Angeleno. Says our green-eyed, teenaged Miss Tyler: “It’s really wild; I’ll meet a dozen people at a party, and they’ll all have come from Kansas or New Jersey or Indiana.” Having spent all of her young life under the bright California sky, Judy is a card-carrying Great-Outdoors Worshipper – horseback riding, swimming, surfing, going for a spin on a motorcycle, the whole Southern California fun-in-the-sun kick. “My only regret,” Judy avers, “is that, the climate being what it is, I haven’t had much of a crack at the winter sports.” When she does make the indoor scene. Judy prefers the simple pleasures – a hearthside corn-popping session, devouring a sausage-and-mushroom pie at the local pizza palace, whipping up a vat of mostaccioli (“It’s a good thing I don’t have a weight problem: I have the appetite of a truck driver”), doing the discothèque bit. Judy, whose face and figure (36-22-34) would seem a sure bet to attract one of nearby Hollywood’s talent scouts, did have a brief, tragicomic fling in the flicks. As she recalls it: “I was four years old, and been taking tap dancing lessons and my folks thought I could be another Shirley Temple. They took me around to the casting offices and, as luck would have it, landed me a part as the daughter of Ida Lupino and Frank Lovejoy in a movie called The Difference, I remember having a number of great dramatic lines like, ‘Good night, Daddy.’ It looked as though I was on my way. Then we went to the preview. The first thing we discovered was that the title had been changed to The Hitch-Hiker; then it became very obvious that the plot had been radically altered and, worst of all, little Judy was nowhere to be seen. As they say, I’d been left on the cutting-room floor. End of my Hollywood career.” We have a feeling Miss January’s last comment may be premature if the filmoguls are wise enough to tap their own natural resources. Head for the Hills, gentlemen: Granada that is.